How the Godzilla Team Designed the Monster's Iconic Scream

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How the Godzilla Team Designed the Monster's Iconic Scream

Dan Matutina

Godzilla's bark is bigger than its bite. Well, maybe not bigger, but the kaiju’s shriek is every bit as iconic as its atomic breath and Tokyo-tromping. “It’s the most important sound effect in cinema history,” says Erik Aadahl, who may be biased by his job as sound designer on Godzilla, the remake out in May. Aadahl and his co-designer, Ethan Van der Ryn, are no strangers to city-destroying rampages—they both worked on Transformers films. So they had some ideas for how to keep Godzilla’s roar recognizable but still meet 21st-century standards.

First, they broke down the roar’s parts. “The main element is this metallic shriek accompanied by an earth-shattering sound,” Aadahl says. “But there is kind of a bellowing finish. There’s the RRAAAAAAAAH of the attack and then an OWWWOOO-WOOMPH.” After plenty of experimenting, Aadahl and Van der Ryn put dry ice on a metal vent that would vibrate and scream as the ice sublimated. “We enhanced that with some low-end sound of rocks crunching,” Aadahl says. For the bellow, they started with actual whale bellows ... which didn’t work. “Eventually we dragged a giant wooden crate across a polished floor.” Usually the sound designers would save all this for postproduction, but the filmmakers wanted it early to aid the monster’s visual design. The team even recorded in a New York set on the Warner Bros. lot to make sure the sound bounced and reverberated realistically. “We projected the roar out over a 12-foot-high, 18-foot- wide, 100-kilowatt speaker array,” Aadahl says, “and got phone calls from Universal Studios across town asking what we were doing.” That’s about 2 miles away. Talk about monster bass.